Here are the details of Curiosity’s discovery of ancient conditions in Yellowknife Bay in Mars’ Gale Crater, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. Ancient Mars could have supported living microbes. That’s what the Mars Curiosity turned up in its first major discovery. Scientists identified sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon — some of the key chemical ingredients for life — in the powder Curiosity drilled out of a sedimentary rock near an ancient stream bed in Gale Crater on the Red Planet last month.

The data indicate the Yellowknife Bay area the rover is exploring was the end of an ancient river system or an intermittently wet lake bed that could have provided chemical energy and other favorable conditions for microbes. The rock is made up of a fine-grained mudstone containing clay minerals, sulfate minerals and other chemicals. This ancient wet environment, unlike some others on Mars, was not harshly oxidizing, acidic or extremely salty.

The patch of bedrock where Curiosity drilled for its first sample lies in an ancient network of stream channels descending from the rim of Gale Crater. The bedrock also is fine-grained mudstone and shows evidence of multiple periods of wet conditions, including nodules and veins.

Curiosity’s drill collected Continue reading Curiosity’s First Major Discovery →

They are part of an ancient quest…To push beyond our boundaries… to see what lies beyond the horizon. Now tens of billions of kilometers from Earth, two spacecraft are streaking out into the void. What will we learn about the Galaxy, the Universe, and ourselves from Voyager’s epic Journey to the stars?

December 19, 1972… the splashdown of the Apollo 17 crew capsule marked the end of the golden age of manned spaceflight. The Mercury…. Gemini… and Apollo programs had proven that we could send people into space… To orbit the Earth…. Fly out beyond our planet…

Then land on the moon and walk among its ancient craters. The collective will to send people beyond our planet faded in times of economic uncertainty, war, and shifting priorities. And yet, just five years after Apollo ended, scientists launched a new vision that was just as profound and far-reaching.

Now on the fringes of our solar system, the two voyager craft are about to venture out into interstellar space. They will endure long after everything man has ever built crumbles to dust. Along the way, they revealed a solar system rich beyond our imagining. According to project leader, Ed Stone:

Time after time we were Continue reading Voyager Journey to the Stars – PREVIEW →

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They spend their early months near shore, riding the waves and learning how to be a sea lion. Then, as adults, sea lions move out into the ocean to forage. Watch as they shred a school of small fish in collaboration with a band of stripped marlin.

Full movie coming very soon. Welcome to Inner Space. Seven decades ago, in March 1940, the author John Steinbeck and his friend, marine biologist Ed Ricketts, sailed down the coast of California and Mexico to the Sea of Cortez.

“The abundance of life here gives one an exuberance,” they wrote, “a feeling of fullness and richness.” Their stated purpose was to document the creatures that inhabit shallow waters and tide pools on the margins of the Sea of Cortez. But it became much more.

In these mysterious, phosphorescent waters they sought an understanding of mankind’s relationship to the natural world, and a wellspring of hope for a world headed toward war. Looking beyond the events of the day, the two friends foresaw our rising impact on the oceans, and the devastating impact that over fishing would have on this rich sea.

And yet, in their journey, they encountered a periodic cooling of the eastern Pacific Ocean known as La Niña that can still set off an explosion of life. Can the story of their journey inspire new efforts to preserve the Sea of Cortez?

From NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio. A new study using observations from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reveals the first clear-cut evidence that the expanding debris of exploded stars produces some of the fastest-moving matter in the universe. This discovery is a major step toward meeting one of Fermi’s primary mission goals.

Cosmic rays are subatomic particles that move through space at nearly the speed of light. About 90 percent of them are protons, with the remainder consisting of electrons and atomic nuclei. In their journey across the galaxy, the electrically charged particles become deflected by magnetic fields. This scrambles their paths and makes it impossible to trace their origins directly.

Through a variety of mechanisms, these speedy particles can lead to the emission of gamma rays, the most powerful form of light and a signal that travels to us directly from its sources. Two supernova remnants, known as IC 443 and W44, are expanding into cold, dense clouds of interstellar gas. This material emits gamma rays when struck by high-speed particles escaping the remnants.

Scientists have been unable to ascertain which particle is responsible for this emission because cosmic-ray protons and electrons give rise to gamma rays with similar energies. Now, after analyzing Continue reading NASA Telescope Discovers the Origin of Cosmic Rays →

This is a preview of our newest Cosmic Journeys episode. Ancient people saw them as messages from the Gods… as supernatural winds that blew from the realm of spirits. Modern science has linked these polar light shows, called auroras, to vast waves of electrified gas hurled in our direction by the sun.

Today, researchers from a whole new generation see this explosive substance, plasma, as an energy source that may one day fuel humanity’s expansion into space. What can we learn, and how far can we go, by tapping into the strange and elusive fourth state of matter?

Since the dawn of rocketry, we’ve relied on the same basic technology to get us off the ground. Fill a cylinder with volatile chemicals, then ignite them in a controlled explosion. The force of the blast is what pushes the rocket up.

Nowadays, chemical rockets are the only ones with enough thrust to overcome Earth’s gravity and carry a payload into orbit. But they are not very efficient. The heavier the payload, the more fuel a rocket needs to lift it into space. But the more fuel a rocket carries, the more fuel it needs. For long-range missions, most spacecraft rely heavily on the initial Continue reading Reinventing Space Flight – PREVIEW →

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope — with a little help from an amateur astronomer — has produced one of the best views yet of nearby galaxy Messier 106, a striking spiral galaxy with a number of secrets.

Located a little over 20 million light-years away, practically a neighbor by galactic standards, Messier 106 is one of the brightest and nearest spiral galaxies to our Milky Way. Although it may not look particularly unique, some of its features have baffled astronomers for years.

Messier 106 has a supermassive black hole at its centre. Although this is true for most galaxies, this black hole is particularly active and hungry, gobbling up nearby material at a startling rate.

This huge black hole’s bottomless appetite is behind much of the galaxy’s unusual behavior. Messier 106 appears to be emitting powerful radiation from its centre — something we do not see with our Milky Way or other similar spirals. This is caused by the very active black hole at the galaxy’s centre, which violently drags gas and dust inwards. This material heats up, emitting bright microwave and X-ray radiation as it does so.
However, this emission is not the most intriguing Continue reading Black Hole Galaxy Sculptor →

Deep underground, the training of the Earth’s new generation of space colonists continues. Jarl Quarkson has mastered his study of some of the workings of space; of pulsars, gamma rays, and the Earth’s capabilities to capture data using FERMI. But while he is comfortable with that knowledge, his instructor, Cerin Higami, has approached him with a new assignment—one that will reshape Jarl’s view of the very fabric of the cosmos.

To understand where we want to go, Jarl must first understand where we came from, starting with the quest to understand the beginnings of the universe.

From EsoCast. Look closely and see a meteor shower captured in this series of timelapse shots. On 14–16 December 2012, the Geminid meteor shower made a spectacular appearance over ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. As the meteors showered down over the site, photographer Gianluca Lombardi spent over 40 hours recording it.

The Geminids is a shower of shooting stars appearing to emanate from within the constellation of Gemini (The Twins). This shower occurs when the Earth cuts through the orbit of an asteroid named 3200 Phaethon, which happens once each year, in December. Particles in the trail of dust along the orbit of Phaethon burn up in our atmosphere, creating the brilliant, fast-moving points of light characteristic of meteor showers.